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A jury on Thursday found TV measurement firm EDO, co-founded by actor Ed Norton, liable for breaching its contract with iSpot, both companies confirmed, awarding iSpot $18.3 million in damages. ISpot was seeking up to $47 million. The jury, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, found that EDO breached its contract with iSpot, in connection with its handling and use of iSpot’s TV ad airings data.“We are in the business of truth, transparency, and trust. Rather than innovate on their own, EDO violated all those principles, and gave us no choice but to hold them accountable,”…
The tech world’s nonconsensual, sexualized deepfake problem is now bigger than just X. In a letter to the leaders of X, Meta, Alphabet, Snap, Reddit, and TikTok, several U.S. senators are asking the companies to provide proof that they have “robust protections and policies” in place and to explain how they plan to curb the rise of sexualized deepfakes on their platforms. The senators also demanded that the companies preserve all documents and information relating to the creation, detection, moderation, and monetization of sexualized, AI-generated images, as well as any related policies. The letter comes hours after X said it…
Tired of having to remember to charge your Apple Watch or Pixel Watch every night? The OnePlus Watch 3 boasts an incredible five days of battery life, letting you go almost a full week without finding an outlet, and it’s currently marked down to just $300 on Amazon in both the Emerald Titanium and Obsidian Titanium colorways.Photograph: Julian ChokkattuPhotograph: Julian ChokkattuPhotograph: Julian ChokkattuOnePlus has employed two main tricks to achieve such a long battery life on such a small watch. The first is silicon-carbon batteries that have a higher storage density than other batteries of the same size, so this…
As part of its 25th birthday celebration, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a series of new partnerships with AI tech companies that are now customers of its commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. Developed by the foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise allows large-scale reuse and distribution of Wikipedia content, as well as content from other Wikimedia projects. In addition to the previously announced partnership with Google in 2022, the organization shared publicly for the first time that it has formed other partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity over the past year. Other partnerships, like Ecosia, Pleias, and ProRata, have been mentioned before…
I’m a picky person when it comes to mattresses. Of the hundreds I’ve tested over my career as a certified sleep coach and mattress tester, I have a short list of ones that have exceeded my expectations. At the top of my list is the Nolah Evolution, with the distinct honor of being the mattress I personally own. Given my job, that’s got to be like the equivalent of a Grammy or Emmy in the mattress world.Photograph: Julia ForbesRapidly approaching Presidents’ Day is one of the best mattress sales weekends of the year (and I do mean best—keep your eyes…
Newsrooms have been experimenting with AI for several years now but, for the most part, those efforts have been just that: experiments. A relatively unknown startup, Symbolic.ai, wants to change that, and it just signed a major deal with News Corp, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch. News Corp, the major assets of which include MarketWatch, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, is set to begin using Symbolic’s AI platform with its financial news hub Dow Jones Newswires. Symbolic.ai, which was founded by former eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes, says its…
Tencia Benavidez, a Supernatural user who lives in New Mexico, started her VR workouts during the Covid pandemic. She has been a regular user in the five years since, calling the ability to work out in VR ideal, given that she lives in a rural area where it’s hard to get to a gym or work out outside during a brutal winter. She stuck with Supernatural because of the community and the eagerness of Supernatural’s coaches.“They seem like really authentic individuals that were not talking down to you,” Benavidez says. “There’s just something really special about those coaches.”Meta bought Supernatural…
The Trump administration signed a notable multi-billion-dollar trade deal with Taiwan that’s designed to help the United States boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Under the deal announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Thursday, Taiwanese semiconductor and tech companies have agreed to make direct investments of $250 billion into the U.S. semiconductor industry. These investments will span across semiconductors, energy and AI “production and innovation,” according to a press release. Taiwan currently produces more than half of the world’s semiconductors. Taiwan will also supply an additional $250 billion in credit guarantees for additional investments from these semiconductors and tech enterprises,…
If someone ever makes an HBO Max series about the AI industry, the events of this week will make quite the episode.On Wednesday, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, announced the company had rehired Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, cofounders of Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. Zoph and Metz had left OpenAI in late 2024.We reported last night on two narratives forming around what led to the departures, and have since learned new information.A source with direct knowledge says that Thinking Machines leadership believed Zoph engaged in an incident of serious misconduct while at the company last year.…
Is it cute? Is it chaotic? Or something in between? Budweiser won’t say yet, but whatever creature is under its bucket is about to turn heads at Super Bowl 60. The beer brand is returning to the Big Game with its 48th national spot, celebrating its 150th anniversary. The teaser, “Stable,” is fronted by five of its iconic Clydesdale horses. The animals are shown standing shoulder-to-shoulder in their St. Louis, Mo. barn.Suddenly, they’re startled by the rattling of an overturned metal bucket being pushed along the ground by an unidentified creature. One of the horses whinnies in amusement, before text…
Through an extension to its previous $50 million Series A round that closed in September, AI video generation startup Higgsfield has sold another $80 million worth of stock, bringing its total Series A to $130 million. The company says it has now hit a $1.3 billion valuation. Higgsfield offers a tool that allows consumers, creators, and social media teams to create and edit AI-generated videos. The company was founded by Alex Mashrabov, former head of Generative AI at Snap, who landed at the company after it bought his previous startup, AI Factory, in 2020 for $166 million. Mashrabov was a…
Elon Musk’s X has introduced new restrictions stopping people from editing and generating images of real people in bikinis or other “revealing clothing.” The change in policy on Wednesday night follows global outrage at Grok being used to generate thousands of harmful nonconsensual “undressing” photos of women and sexualized images of apparent minors on X.However, while it appears that some safety measures have finally been introduced to Grok’s image generation on X, the stand-alone Grok app and website seem to still be able to generate “undress”-style images and pornographic content, according to multiple tests by researchers, WIRED, and other journalists.…
Higgsfield, an AI video startup positioning itself at the center of advertising’s shift toward synthetic media, has hired former Perplexity ad executive Taz Patel as vice president of platform partnerships, ADWEEK has learned. Patel began the role this week and will report directly to CEO Alex Mashrabov. He is tasked with turning widespread adoption of Higgsfield’s AI video tools into more formal relationships with agencies and brands. While Higgsfield is being used by enterprise-level agencies and brands on a self-serve business, “we’re just not engaging them yet” on a deeper level, Patel said. As marketers increasingly test AI-generated video—often quietly and without…
As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians have been completely blocked from accessing the internet for more than a week, in what is now one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns ever, according to experts. Last Thursday, Iran’s leadership blocked internet and phone access across the whole country in response to massive anti-government protests, which began at the end of last year and have prompted a brutal and deadly crackdown from authorities. As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for more than 170 hours. The previous longest shutdowns in the country lasted around 163 hours…
When Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good last Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, the 37-year-old mother became one of at least 25 people killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting since 2015.In the days after Ross fired at Good multiple times from the front and side of Good’s car, visual investigations from outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have reconstructed the event, which unfolded in a matter of seconds, combing through a series of videos that emerged from various angles. These present apparent contradictions between the narrative presented by the White House and…
Gap is making a big push into original entertainment, hiring Pam Kaufman as executive vice president, chief entertainment officer, a newly created role. Kaufman, a former Paramount executive, will be tasked with building the retail company’s “Fashiontainment” platform, which spans entertainment, content, and licensing across music, television, film, sports, gaming, consumer products, and cultural collaborations. She will start on Feb. 2 and report to Gap Inc. president and CEO Richard Dickson. Gap Inc., which owns brands including Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, will also open an office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles this spring. Kaufman will split her time between LA,…